Lots of mistakes

Apparently I was trying to juggle too many things in my head while cutting out the fabric, because I made some major doozies while cutting out the fabric.  The worst one was probably cutting both back pieces against the grain, so the order of the colored stripes is opposite that of the front!  Well, at least they match each other, and there is enough going on in the rest of the jacket that I don’t think it will be obvious.  You’d have to be looking from the side and paying serious attention to make it out.

I also mis-cut one of the facings, also a serious mistake that forced me to re-cut the piece.  What with all the errors, I’ve got barely enough fabric, about two half-yard pieces after I cut the sleeves.  Good thing I wove all that extra yardage!  It’s insurance against later incompetence.

(Note to self: next time, make a checklist of all the things that need to be “just so”, and follow it!  Works for more things than flying airplanes.)

Anyway, the pieces are all cut now (except the sleeves, which I will do later this morning), and it’s time to apply the interfacing.  We are using hair canvas as a sew-in interfacing, because we weren’t sure about applying two fusibles on top of each other.  I could have sewn it in by machine, but being me, I had to do it the hard way:

Here I’ve cut the interfacing using the facing pattern, then trimmed out 5/8″ + 1/16″ = 11/16″ around the sides.  The 5/8″ is to keep it out of the seam allowance, and the 1/16″ is to give the seam room to turn.  I’ve then catchstitched it to the facing.

These two pieces took me about an hour and a half, so the bulk of my work this week will be the two big facing pieces in front. I’m guessing the two of them will take six hours to do.  After that, I will need to cut out the lining (a challenge in slippery charmeuse) and assemble the outer pieces, and the facing/lining.  Given that my trip to AVL will take up all of Saturday, I’m not sure I can finish all that by Sunday afternoon, when I go up to see Sharon again.  If I have to, I’ll settle for just getting the outer shell completed, so we can do the final fitting.